A4 The Buffalo News/Friday, November 10, 2017 WASHINGTON NEWS POLITICAL NOTEBOOK C A L I F OR N I A Impeachment drive to double its spending LOS ANGELES – Billionaire Democratic donor Tom Steyer said Thursday that he planned to double his spending on his impeachment campaign against President Trump to $20 million. “The American people have responded beyond our expectations to this message, and it’s clear we’re giving voice to the deep concerns about this president,” Steyer told reporters on a conference call. He said in addition to millions of viewers of the “Need to Impeach” group’s television ad, 1.3 million people have watched it on YouTube and 1.9 million have signed a petition calling for the president’s removal from office. “We’re doubling down on our effort.” Steyer said the group plans to unveil two new television ads in the coming weeks. Asked about the concerns among some Democrats, notably House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, that the impeachment message distracts from their efforts in Washington and goal to retake the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, Steyer said that his effort was not about campaign tactics. “I think what we’re trying to do is give a forum and a voice to the American people to register their concerns and fears about what this president is doing,” he said. – Los Angeles Times DI S T R IC T OF C OLU M BI A 600,000 sign up for ACA coverage plans WASHINGTON – More than 600,000 Americans signed up for insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act during the first four days of the new enrollment season, according to federal figures that signal a brisk start despite Republicans’ efforts to dismantle the law. Some 601,462 Americans chose a health plan from Nov. 1-4 in states relying on the federal exchange, the figures released Thursday by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show. While CMS officials did not provide a direct comparison with any of the four previous enrollment periods, administration officials said that more than 200,000 consumers selected plans on the first day, more than double the number last year. The officials spoke about the first-day figure on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose it. The overall total for the initial four days compares with just over 1 million Americans who signed up on the federal exchange during the first 12 days of open enrollment in 2016. – Washington Post DI S T R IC T OF C OLU M BI A 13,000 more files on JFK death released WASHINGTON – The federal government Thursday made public more than 13,000 additional documents from its files on President John F. Kennedy’s assassination as it seeks to finally release the last papers from its once-secret collection related to the 1963 murder. The release was the fourth since summer and primarily includes documents that were released in the past, but with sensitive information redacted. The versions posted online Thursday were for the most part supposed to reveal the previously withheld portions in keeping with a 1992 law mandating the maximum release possible by 2017. As scholars and conspiracy theorists have combed through the files, they have not yet reported discovering conclusive evidence that definitively changes the previous understanding of the assassination or the weeks and months surrounding it. The archives still has about 17,465 files that remain to be released. – New York Times Senate GOP tax plan diverges from version in House, highlighting political pressures By Jim Tankersley, Alan Rappeport and Thomas Kaplan N E W YOR K T I ME S WASHINGTON – Senate Republicans outlined their vision Thursday for overhauling the tax code, proposing a one-year delay in President Trump’s top priority of cutting the corporate tax rate while reinstating some prized tax breaks used by middle-class families. The Senate bill differs significantly from the House version approved by the Ways and Means Committee on Thursday: It would preserve some popular tax breaks, including ones for mortgage interest and medical expenses, and would maintain a bottom tax rate of 10 percent for lower earners. But it would also jettison the deduction for state and local taxes entirely and delay the enforcement of a 20 percent corporate tax rate until 2019, which could rankle the White House and mute the economic growth projections that Republicans are counting on to blunt the cost of the tax cuts. The disparate bills show the competing pressures that Republican lawmakers are facing and the calculations that Senate and House leaders are making to ensure passage of the bills through their respective chambers. While both bills share the main priorities of cutting corporate and individual taxes, they diverge on matters of high political sensitivity, particularly for vulnerable House Republicans from high-tax states and for Senate Republicans concerned about adding to the federal budget deficit. Senate staff members said their draft would require changes, likely major ones, to survive procedural rules that allow it to pass on a party-line vote. Those changes could include setting some of the tax cuts to expire after a period of years. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., who has announced that he will not seek re-election, raised concerns that the legislation could add more to federal deficits. “I remain concerned over how the current tax reform proposals will grow the already staggering national debt,” Flake said, “by opting for short-term fixes while ignoring long-term problems for taxpayers and the economy.” Sens. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said the bill did not go far enough in increasing the child tax credit, which rose to $1,650 per child in the Senate version, from $1,600 in the House bill. “The Senate is not going to pass a bill that isn’t clearly pro-family,” they said in a joint statement, “so we look forward to working with our colleagues to get there.” Stocks tumbled on the news that the corporate rate cut may be delayed. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell by 0.4 percent and the Nasdaq 100 slipped by 0.5 percent. “The Street definitely felt like there was some connection between tax policy and the market reaction, which was pretty severe,” said Les Funtleyder, a portfolio manager at E Squared Capital Management in New York. FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy group, called the Senate’s plan to delay the corporate tax cut “unacceptable.” Still, several business groups and Republican leaders applauded the movement in both chambers. The influential National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small businesses and had opposed the House bill, reversed course and said it backed New York Times Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, talks with reporters about Senate Republicans’ tax-overhaul plan Thursday on Capitol Hill and how it differs from the House GOP proposal. both an amended House bill and the Senate version. Other groups shook off the delayed rate cut and embraced the Senate plan. “It’s been a week of remarkable progress,” said Michael A. Steel, a former House leadership aide who is a managing director for Hamilton Place Strategies, a consultancy in Washington. GOP leaders expressed optimism that they could quickly address concerns and resolve the competing political pressures facing their lawmakers in the Senate and House. “This will be met with Senate consternation and all kinds of things,” said Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., who oversees the House Ways and Means tax policy subcommittee. “But when it comes down to it, what we’re on the verge today is winning an argument – winning an argument about the future of our economy and what our worldview is.” The bill set for introduction in the Senate Finance Committee includes seven income brackets, scuttling some of the simplicity that House drafters used to sell their bill, which reduced the number of brackets to four. It would keep the bottom tax bracket for individuals at 10 percent, which the House had raised to 12 percent, and would reduce the top rate for high earners to 38.5 percent, down from the current rate of 39.6 percent, which the House had maintained. Like the House bill, the Senate’s version plans to roughly double the standard deduction and expand the child tax credit. The starkest example of the competing priorities is the state and local tax deduction, which is heavily used in high-tax states like New York, New Jer- sey and California, which are represented by Democrats in the Senate but have some Republican representatives in the House. The Senate completely eliminates the valuable tax break, which allows taxpayers to deduct state and local income, sales and property taxes. The House bill would still allow individuals to deduct property taxes up to $10,000. Some House Republicans have rejected that limitation as too strict and the Senate’s complete elimination could further spook those members, whose political future could be imperiled if they pass a plan that actually increases their constituents’ tax bills. “Every state should be a winner in tax reform, and in my opinion, that would not be the case if the Senate view were to prevail,” said Rep. Leonard Lance, R-N.J. “I’m not voting for the $10,000, so I’m certainly not voting for zero,” Lance said. Senate staff members said the bill would meet Republicans’ target of not losing more than $1.5 trillion in tax revenue over a decade. But they suggested that the Finance Committee would need to make changes to ensure it does not lose revenue after 10 years, and thus stays in compliance with the procedural rules that would allow the bill to pass on a party-line vote. In another significant departure from the House bill, the Senate would not create a special, lower top rate for pass-through entities, which are businesses whose profits are distributed to their owners and taxed as individual income. Instead, the Senate would create a deduction for pass-through owners of all income levels, effectively lowering taxes both on rich owners and on middle-class small-business owners who would not have benefited from the House’s original lower pass-through rate. On Thursday, in the face of pushback from fellow GOP lawmakers, small businesses and other industry groups, Rep. Kevin P. Brady of Texas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, unveiled a 29-page amendment making further revisions to the House’s tax plan. The amendment restores the adoption tax credit, which the House tax plan had planned to repeal. It also creates a new, lower tax rate for certain business owners. Under the new provision, the first $37,500 of business income would be taxed at 9 percent, rather than 12 percent, for an unmarried individual earning less than $75,000 through a passthrough business. For a married couple, the dollar amounts would be double. The Senate is including a provision to prevent large multinational corporations from stashing profits overseas. The bill will propose a new business tax on U.S. and foreign companies – effectively a minimum tax on their income earned in the United States – while also levying a 12.5 percent tax on income that U.S. companies receive overseas from their intellectual property. Estimates indicate the provision would raise more than $130 billion in revenue over 10 years to help offset revenue lost from rate cuts, committee staffers said. The original House approach, which would have levied a 20 percent “excise tax” on payments between U.S. and foreign companies that are affiliated with each other, would have raised an estimated $155 billion in revenue. Under fire, Ross sells shipping investment By Carrie Levine C E N T E R FOR PU BL IC I N T E GR I T Y Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has divested his interest in Diamond S Shipping Group Inc., one of the world’s largest owners and operators of medium-range tanker vessels and the subject of a Center for Public Integrity investigation. Ross “has fully divested of his interest in Diamond S. Shipping,” Commerce Department spokesman James Rockas said Tuesday, in response to questions from the Center for Public Integrity. Ross is currently in Beijing, traveling with President Trump. Critics have raised questions about whether overseas shipping investments are appropriate for Ross, who is among the Trump administration’s most influential trade policy players. Most of Diamond S Shipping’s fleet sails under Chinese flags, and the company has ties to a major Chinese investment fund. Its ships have also visited ports in Russian and Iran – two nations that have for years found themselves in conflict with U.S. interests, and particularly so during Trump’s nascent presidency. Ross, who this week has also come under scrutiny for a separate shipping investment with ties to Russia, was not immediately available for comment. Rockas could not immediately say exactly when Ross shed his stake in Diamond S Shipping. Randi Strudler of Jones Day, a lawyer representing Diamond S Shipping, said the company is owned by investment funds and does not have any independent way to verify the identities of those owning a stake in the investment funds at any given time. Ross had been non-executive chairman of Diamond S Shipping’s board, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and agreed to step down from his position with the company when he took the Commerce Department job, according to his public ethics agreement. But during his confirmation hearing for the commerce secretary position, Ross confirmed he had no plans to divest his stake in Diamond S Shipping, and maintained that his investment didn’t pose a conflict. “The research we’ve done suggests that there has never been a shipping case come before the Department of Commerce,” he said according to a hearing transcript, adding, “I intend to be quite scrupulous about recusal and any topic where’s there the slightest scintilla of doubt.” A Center for Public Integrity examination of Diamond S Shipping’s operations, however, found the company’s operations raised complex conflict-ofinterest concerns. Diamond S Shipping’s vessels call at ports all over the world. One of its main customers, commodities giant Glencore PLC, last year acquired a stake in Russian national oil company Rosneft, a deal that drew scrutiny from American and European regulators. The Glencore-Rosneft deal marked the biggest foreign investment in Russia since the United States and the European Union imposed sanctions in 2014 because of the country’s military occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region. Rosneft is under U.S. sanctions. Glencore said the deal complied with the sanctions. Asked if the deal violated the spirit of the sanctions, Amos Hochstein, then U.S. special envoy for international energy affairs, said, “Clearly this is not what we were hoping for when we implemented sanctions.” Diamond S Shipping said it has – and may continue to – “call on ports located in countries subject to sanctions and embargoes imposed by the U.S. government and countries identified … as state sponsors of terrorism, such as Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria,” according to its 2014 filing with the SEC. Diamond S Shipping is based in Greenwich, Conn., but is incorporated offshore in the Marshall Islands. Ross’s use of offshore holding companies and his stake in another shipping company, Navigator Holdings, also drew attention this week. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and the New York Times reported as part of the Paradise Papers investigation that Navigator’s biggest customer was a Russian company with ties to both a Russian oligarch under U.S. sanctions and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s son-inlaw.